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Imperial College London Deploys Brocade's FastIron SX 800 and SX 1600 10 Gbps SwitchesNov 17, 2009 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Brocade, a developer of networking solutions for data-intensive businesses, announced that Imperial College London has deployed Brocade FastIron SX 800 and SX 1600 10 Gbps switches to increase network capacity for departments and third parties using its data centre facilities. Imperial College London is a science-based institution with particular focus on engineering, medicine, natural sciences and business. Home to 14 Nobel Laureates and two Fields Medal winners, Imperial College was founded in 1907. "The university's data centre estate has grown by 50 percent in three years and uptime is paramount," said Dathan Birrell, Imperial College London's network operations manager. "Network performance and resilience has been massively improved and our Layer 2 data centre ring now has sub second failover. Such resilience means that we can operate in the unfortunate event of an outage - even the loss of an entire data centre - and still offer highly available services to our stakeholders." Because of the reliability of the Brocade infrastructure, Imperial College estimates that it has saved GBP15,000 per annum on support as business day cover is all that is required, not 24/7 monitoring. Offering a non blocking IP switch architecture, the Brocade FastIron SX-series switches provide n+1 power and have fully hot swappable line cards, so that should individual components need to be removed for maintenance or replacement, the whole network operates unimpeded. Similarly, servers are dually attached to the Brocade switches ensuring additional reliability and protection against outages. ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) |